$\begingroup$Those are characters 0xC4 and 0x3A in the Latin-8 encoding. (In particular, they are regrettably not 0x2B and ~0x2B.) In decimal, 196 and 58.$\endgroup$
– Gareth McCaughan♦May 19 '16 at 10:40

3 Answers
3

Could your computer be asking the question: "To be or not to be?" from Shakespeare's Hamlet? My reasoning was simmilar to Caelan's, except I expected to get the Hex value 0x2B from ord('Ä'), but it was giving me 196 (0xC4), and I didn't think to divide by two. If I did so, I would have found that the unicode encoding was 'b', chr(196/2) == 'b', but I just didn't have time to think through my answer, and posted this guess on a hunch. However, looking back If you take unichr(59) which is the ~ (binary NOT) operation of the hex value '0xc4' (~196 is negative).

The unicode code for Ä is U+00C4. The key part here is C4.
If we translate C4 from hexadecimal to decimal, we get the number 196. Half of 196 is 98.
Let's now translate 98 from decimal to hexadecimal to get 62, and look for unicode code U+0062.
The letter that comes out is b. Note that 196 being 2 times 98 is where the two comes from.
Whatever you do for the colon, you will come to something that is not 2b.